


love is (really not) a battlefield

by amorekay



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Felix Hugo Fraldarius Is An Idiot, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Gift Giving, Humor, Love Languages, M/M, Mentioned Blue Lions Students (Fire Emblem), Miscommunication, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 11:35:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21899464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorekay/pseuds/amorekay
Summary: This is not their first fight. It’s not even approaching their worst fight—it’s not evenintheir Top Ten Fights. It’s third tier, at best.And yet.Somehow Felix has ended up here again, glaring at a closed door, even as he’s starting to feel an annoying pang ofsomethingat the shuffling of feet on the other side.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 36
Kudos: 265
Collections: 2019 Dimilix Holiday Exchange





	love is (really not) a battlefield

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unsungillumination](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsungillumination/gifts).

> A/N: My gift for Rook for the Dimilix Exchange!
> 
> I took the “love languages and their (in)compatibilities” prompt and a little bit of the desire for bants and ended up with… this. Felix is an idiot and a fool. I hope you enjoy it!! Happy holidays!!!!

This is not their first fight. It’s not even approaching their worst fight—it’s not even _in_ their Top Ten Fights. It’s third tier, at best. 

And yet. 

Somehow Felix has ended up here again, glaring at a closed door, even as he’s starting to feel an annoying pang of _something_ at the shuffling of feet on the other side.

“Will you let me in, Felix?” 

He stares down the door. The door stares back. Felix looks away. “No.” 

A sigh. The dejected, pitiful one. This particular sigh is—these days—one of Dimitri’s less frequent ones, upstaged by the ‘I just did a whole workload of paperwork and I’m very satisfied with myself and my diligence towards the Kingdom’ sigh and the ‘that was something very astute of you, Felix’ sigh. The fact that he’s called it back _definitely_ doesn’t make the uncomfortable pang of something in Felix’s chest any worse. 

“I brought—” A pause. “I’ll leave it here. If you wish to speak with me soon, I’ll be in my quarters. Or, well, I may be called away—I’m afraid I’m not sure how busy I’ll be. And tomorrow, with the meetings…”

Felix tunes him out. He’ll start to go on and on, and it’ll make Felix frustrated, and they’ll start fighting again, and it’s foolish, because he knows how busy Dimitri is. He’s plenty busy himself, both in obligations here and in Fraldarius affairs conducted through his uncle. But Dimitri overschedules, and overworks, and undersleeps, and never has a moment to himself—and he’s always willing to drop the few moments they do get in order to take on whatever anyone throws at him. It’s foolish, and dangerous, and frustrating. 

“Shut up,” he says, to the solid wood of the door. There’s a pause. 

“Felix?”

“Whatever,” He breathes in through his nose and exhales in frustration. “I’ll come find you when I’m not sick of the sight of you. This isn’t—we’ve been here before.” 

“Of course. I’ll—see you later, Felix.” 

When he leaves his room later, there’s a plate of meat skewers placed outside. 

“Hm,” Felix says. 

He eats them. 

***

It happens again. “The sight of you disgusts me,” Felix says, to the door in front of him. The door says nothing back.

Dimitri, from the other side, says, “Did you say somethi—? Felix, I really am sorry. But I don’t think you should have talked to the ambassador that way, even if I do agree with some of your, ah, finer points on the matter. Not only did it offend her, but I’m sure it left the whole contingent with less faith in us, and—”

So maybe—and the voice in his head saying this sounds nothing like Mercedes, obviously— Felix hasn’t always been the best at the finer points of diplomacy and could—and this is definitely not Annette’s voice chiming in—learn to catch more flies with honey than… something. They couldn’t remember. They’d spent five minutes offering up different suggestions and giggling about it while he stood there, too. 

Anyway. 

Maybe he’s a little in the wrong on this one. 

Before he can gather up the resolve to tell Dimitri that embarrassing fact about this particular situation, Dimitri continues, “I know you want me to leave you alone, so. I will do just that. But Felix…”

Felix waits. 

Silence. Finally, Dimitri adds in a much softer tone, “I’m truly grateful that you would wish to advocate for me like that. It is… reassuring, to have you by my side.” 

Felix definitely doesn’t feel his cheeks heat. He definitely isn’t so thrown off his stride that he forgets he was going to admit that, maybe, he was a little in the wrong this time. It’s Dimitri’s fault, anyway, distracting him with statements like that. He makes a mental note to watch out for Dimitri when the most obnoxious of the ambassadors try to get their claws in him again in the future. Dimitri’s helpless on his own, always too hopeful to please everyone, even those who clearly only have their own interests at heart and make Felix’s hackles raise just looking at them. 

He opens the door to tell Dimitri he needs to learn to be better at fighting these battles and—finds he’s already left the hall. 

There is another plate of food, steaming hot, outside his room again. Felix has an irritated, sinking feeling look at it. He shoves the meat bun in his mouth anyway. 

***

Felix isn’t going to say that this is a pattern, because a pattern of—for lack of a better term—_sulking_ in his room while Dimitri attempts to appease him from the other side of the door is nothing less than mortifying. 

He stares at the familiar wood grain of the door in front of him. 

It’s not a pattern. 

“Somehow, it feels like this has become a pattern,” Dimitri says, thickly, with a little self-conscious laugh that makes Felix’s heart clench in two very contradictory ways. 

He frowns. His head throbs painfully from where it had connected with Dimitri’s face. 

“How is your head?” Dimitri continues, voice muffled around the hand he’s clearly still holding to his nose. “I’m sorry that I surprised you when I—” he breaks off into another self-conscious laugh. “We hadn’t had an afternoon together in so long, I suppose I got … somewhat overeager.” 

Felix’s face heats. It was fine. He just hadn’t expected _that_. And his head colliding with Dimitri’s face as he jolted in surprise in the middle of things was—vexing. Anyway, he definitely hadn’t fled to his room. This was a strategic retreat.

“Come back in an hour,” he says to Dimitri. “I’ll—be here.” 

“Oh!” Dimitri exclaims, less muffled now. “Yes! Felix, I still wish to spend time with you. I’ll bring something to eat, of course, I wouldn’t forget that.” 

Felix scowls. 

He has the frustrating feeling there’s something he’s missing. 

***

The fourth fight isn’t important, because it ends the same way as every one before it has. Felix, the door, and Dimitri—suspiciously silent on the other side. Only this time, Felix’s stomach is already churning unpleasantly with something not unlike the queasy weight of guilt. 

“Dimitri, wait—“ He yanks the door open and immediately puts the toe of his boot through something. 

It’s a plate, of course. Stacked with meat skewers, now precariously balancing on the broken pieces—an excessive amount of food that Dimitri must’ve begged off the cooks. 

“Again,” Felix states, flatly. He adds up all the details of all their most recent fights, and comes to the same conclusion—every time, Dimitri has left him food. A gift.

Clearly, he realizes, irritation mounting, he’s just trying to _appease_ him. And now he’s ruined a plate of perfectly good food because Dimitri left it outside his door like an imbecile because he felt _guilty_. If he thinks he’s going to slink away from his problems with his tail between his legs like this, Felix is going to change his mind. 

He looks down at the meat skewers. The voice in his head—clearly the annoying habit of being around Ingrid so long—says: are you still going to eat those? 

Felix frowns.

***

The pull of his anger carries him through the halls, past the training yard, past the castle cats that clamour at his feet until he pauses and distributes a piece of the skewer that he’s eating, past the kitchens that fuel his irritation again, and finally to Dimitri’s rooms—past the guards that give him one look and step aside. 

Dimitri looks up from the paperwork at his desk and stands, quickly, when Felix rounds on him. He points at him with the skewer. “Are you trying to placate me? Are you trying to cajole your way out of things with _gifts_?

“Felix—What—” He looks so surprised that a little of Felix’s anger flickers out completely. He drops his hand. 

“Every single time, you’ve left me food. Every time. What is that, Dimitri?” he demands. 

“Felix…” Dimitri hesitates. He looks down at his own hands, then back up at Felix, then back down at his hands, then at the skewer in Felix’s. 

Felix frowns at him. “What?”

“I’m afraid if I say it, you may just get more angry with me.”

Felix shifts impatiently, free hand going to his hip. “Just get on with it.”

“The only reason I would ever get you a gift, Felix, is to try to express my affection for you. The…” He looks very sincere, “depth of how I care for you. If I’ve only been doing so when I’ve displeased you, well, I must think on that.” He tucks a hand under his chin. “Perhaps I have been erring on the side of gifts only at fraught moments too often? Yes, I’ll have to think on that…”

Felix isn’t listening anymore. The disgustingly endearing ramble of Dimitri’s stream of consciousness becomes background noise to the ringing in his skull as he’s suddenly reminded of a time from more than five years ago. 

Dimitri, standing outside his door at the monastery, during that first month at the Academy.

Dimitri standing there while Felix curled around his pillow and refused to make a noise, trying to get him to give up and go away and _forget_ about this. Tried to get him to stop bringing gifts like there was still something of the boy left in there, not the beast who wore his face as a mask—like he still remembered who Felix was and what he cared about. How dare he plunge that sword any deeper into his side. How dare he. 

But he had come, trailing to Felix’s door like a scolded dog almost daily for that first month, seeking to apologize to Felix for something he never seemed to be able to name or understand.

Felix had caved, finally. Agreed to train with him, to stop the gifts. To stop the facade. 

The realization hits him harder than any blow to the side. _To try to express my affection for you. The depth of how I care for you_. Even then—even then, when Dimitri was so...

“Stop,” he says, outloud. Dimitri pauses mid-sentence. “Forget it. I’m leaving. I’ll—come back later.”

“Felix,” Dimitri calls, and Felix hates how wounded his voice sounds. 

He doesn’t stop walking until he makes it back to his quarters, still as quiet and empty as they were when he left them, the broken plate still on the floor outside the door. He frowns down at it, his stomach churning unpleasantly. 

The voice in his head—that sounds suspiciously and awfully like Sylvain— says, wow, you really put your foot in it this time, Felix. 

And then, after a beat. The plate, get it? You put your foot through the plate and through Dimitri’s poor heart. 

Felix makes a mental note to kill Sylvain next time he sees him. 

***

So he’s been a fool. He’s been a complete and utter fool, and miscalculated something about Dimitri in an awful way. It feels terrible. It also feels familiar.

He has to fix it. 

What’s he supposed to do? Beat Dimitri at his own game? Get him a gift?

Of course!—the voice in his head, suspiciously enthusiastic and suspiciously like Ashe, chimes in—when Loog and Kyphon were dramatically at odds and needed to show their devotion to each other once more, what was it that they’d gift? A strong and reliable steed, to show they’d always ride together or, oh! Maybe a beautiful silver goblet engraved with scenes of all their shared adventures! 

I’m not doing that, Felix thinks. 

He goes through the next of his sword forms, his thoughts quieting down in the comfortable rhythm of the movement and the familiarity of the training yard. If only he could just _fight_ Dimitri as a gift. 

I don’t think that’s how it works, the not-Ashe voice pipes up, hesitantly. Felix slashes his way through the next form. This is pointless, he thinks, and then pauses. 

He looks at his sword. Dimitri was desperate to get his—always hazardous—hands on the sword of Zoltan. He loved every weapon that he and Felix both marveled over as children. He had, apparently, given Edelgard a dagger, and only a fool wouldn’t see the merit of that gift. 

He drops his sword to his side and grins. Obviously, he’s found the perfect plan.

It takes a while to put the plan into action. Getting a quality weapon made by a quality weaponsmith isn’t an overnight deal, and if Felix is going to get a gift, he’s going to get the best one possible—so cutting corners isn’t an option. Dimitri is just going to have to wait for it. It takes longer than expected, until finally the weaponsmith has handed over the finished piece to him. 

But when he pulls the sword from its scabbard, it’s totally worth it. The craftsmanship is undeniable and the blade is honed to perfection, and everything about it speaks of its prowess. Felix is giddy. 

Anyway, it’s really cool. It’s the coolest gift. He swings the sword up and tests the balance and grins. 

He’s the best at gift giving, actually. Dimitri isn’t going to know what hit him. 

***

Dimitri doesn’t know what hit him. He bursts into tears. Felix is baffled. 

“Felix,” Dimitri says, tears streaming down his face, following it up with a very mucusy sniffle. “This is for me? You got this as a gift… for me?” 

“It’s a sword. For you,” Felix says, flatly. 

His thoughts are judging him, silently. The silence sounds like Dedue. 

“So, _obviously_,” he adds. 

Dimitri looks down at the sword, held reverently in his hands in a way that makes Felix’s face heat. Dimitri was supposed to be blown away by his gift-giving prowess, not cradle it like he’d just handed him someone’s infant. 

“Why?” Dimitri asks, gently.

“It’s a gift,” Felix repeats. “To express my—” He freezes. Does he have to say it?

Dimitri knows. Felix knows he knows. He just—didn’t realize that Dimitri might have been trying to tell him the same thing in a different way, and it still makes him feel like a fool to realize he’s misread him so long. It’s frustrating to still be missing communication with him. He frowns.

“If you want to work yourself like a pack animal until your back breaks under the strain, that’s your choice, but don’t make me watch as you drive yourself into the ground. Others will always demand things more things from you than they should and you only make it worse when you cater to them. They don’t _deserve_ all of your time.”

Dimitri is looking at him intently.

“And stop bringing me gifts after we fight, it’s irritating to watch you grovel regardless of the intent. You’re not the only one involved in the argument.” Felix pauses. “Getting gifts… is not terrible. I couldn’t let you show me up. Obviously. So take it or don’t, but it’s yours.” 

“Ah, Felix, you truly do,” Dimitri muses, and the small private smile he sends his way inexplicably makes Felix’s face heat more, “care so deeply.”

“Hn,” Felix says.

Dimitri smiles brighter. “And, ah, it is true—I have been so concerned about the state of the Kingdom, I’ve perhaps thrown myself more wholeheartedly into affairs than is for the best. I will do my best to remedy that. And I’ll make it a priority, of course, to spend more time with you. Felix… I always want to spend time with you.”

Dimitri’s ridiculous crying must be contagious, Felix thinks, rubbing at his face. Dimitri reaches up and touches a hand to his cheek. 

“It’s beautiful,” Dimitri says. He lays a hand over the scabbard and looks at Felix sincerely. “Felix, I will cherish it.”

“You better,” Felix says, and he doesn’t sound choked up at all. 

***

[_A few moments later: _]  
Dimitri wipes his nose. He beams a watery smile in Felix’s direction. “Did you think I was trying to… platecate you?”

A pause.

“Felix? Did you see what I did there. ‘Plate’-cate, like a plate, you see. It’s very—”

“I take it back,” Felix hisses. “I’m sick of you already.”

**Author's Note:**

> I went with gift giving as Dimitri’s love language (though I think words of affirmation are right up there!) because we have multiple instances of him giving meaningful gifts in the game, including the dagger for Edelgard and even like, candies in Ashe’s support, etc! 
> 
> Felix, who stands watch over Dimitri in the ruined cathedral, who likes to spend time sparring with people, who always remembers that time with his brother, etc, felt like his love language would be ‘quality time,’ and I worked that into this a bit as well! I think they both often use a language of ‘acts of service’ with loved ones in their lives, but these ones have special meaning. Thank you for giving such an interesting prompt! 
> 
> It also ended up rather silly at parts. I hope you enjoyed it (:


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